Butterfly Effect
by End Noesis
Summary: When you dream, where do you go? Non-canon spiel within a certain Clow Card's playground.


**A/N:** This is a purposely cryptic piece, describing Yue's encounter with Dream and Sakura.

* * *

Blue wings.

Iridescence.

Sublime flashes.

The dream-woman glided by, her headdress only shifting slightly in my direction to acknowledge my presence. Beneath the covering, I was confident her eyes remained shut in the eternal dreaming state. Rapid Eye Movement.

Involuntary succession of moving pictures, thoughts, feelings...

Lucid.

Freudian psychoanalysis babble.

Oneirological freefall.

Amygdala magnetic resonance imaging.

I was in that dark, beautiful place. I was in the dreaming.

Fingers snapped. My attention zoomed out butterfly wings, now melded into sunny blue sky, onto a pretty brunette with a quizzical jade-green gaze. She must have been in her twenties now, in appearance only; true age was indistinct. The cherubic features of her younger self smoothed out into delicate pixie-like, high cheekbones, small rounded lips, sharp cupid's bow. The rest of her gained depth and fullness... and parabolic lines I followed with fingers, adjusting their curvature to fit tangentially.

I could get used to this.

She blushed at my impulsive affectionate behavior. Un-characteristically me. Her heart raced. Systolic/diastolic pressures rising fleetingly. Fleeting. Fleet. Flight. Or fight. Human built of web of veins and arteries, arterioles and venules, capillaries and oxygen diffusion. No, more. Soul. Yes, soul. Soul enclosed in pericardium.

I slowed to hear angry thudding against her chest, where my fingertips followed the embroidery of her sorceress attire. Too much like Clow's, only stylized for a female and in a shade of emerald, its green shine muted in velvet and by golden detailing. Odd, I would have expected an illicit shade of pink, as juvenile as the outfits she donned in her card-capturing past.

Time changes everything.

"I apologize I didn't know if this was okay." I lifted her hand to my lips and planted a kiss on her knuckles. This pleasantry expected, accepted.

"Syaoran's color," she announced. I released her. Taking it for offended by her declaration, she turned apologetic, "I know you were wondering why-"

"I'd forgotten your acquired clairvoyance, that's all." A magical defense to combat unwavering naiveté. Clow Reed's last farewell gift. He had known her better than she knew herself.

She examined her fingers, searching for the abnormality behind her ability to read others like books. Like textbooks she didn't care for much in her school days. Some people, like books, were best left unread. Untouched, undisturbed mysteries. Some knowledge gained would cost you awe in something grand and divine. Like star mythos for astronomy. Like love for… "I'm still learning how to shut it off and on as needed."

"Learn quickly," I admonished with gritted teeth.

Her expression was unreadable. Another change with time. To be powerful for the length of several centuries, you'd have to control vulnerabilities, to protect them and yourself. Like everything else, time was required, time was essence.

When a magical warlord took the Li clan down completely decades earlier, in search of her, maintaining a mask of invincibility in all forms of existing was a necessity.

A smokescreen. Smoke and mirrors.

Illusion. Delusion. Deception.

Only I could break through briefly and bring her back to humanity – as peculiar as it sounded. I was her last tie to finality, to mortality, having experienced Yukito's death from within.

His life trickled away, after serving a purpose longer than required. Permanently dormant within, buried in subconscious folds, gyria where neural synapses short-circuited and retrieved nothing. I was his grave marker, a living memorandum.

The Daidouji descendant, eyes of deep violet like her grandmother's, hair of auburn like her late grandfather's, brought me handpicked flowers. Peach blossoms.

Mistress conjured Flower and filled fields with white roses. Their heads, when still, resembled a blanket of snowfall over green, as if a gentle blizzard depositioned there. Appropriately so.

A kiss, in which she caught an afterthought.

Snow appeared to sprinkle her ice crystals, delicate flakes of frozen cloud droplets over the scene.

Yukito died of old age, as I vaguely recalled, months after Touya passed on, whose life ended from complications following an embolism.

I kept an old promise. I'd guard _her_ for eternity.

Cerberus was taken down protecting the Li leader, Syaoran. In his last breath, he cursed the _brat_, then an old man. He spoke of their lifelong friendship brought about after years of petty enmity, recollected an old spat, and thanked him for making his life interesting. My brother died in his arms, and Syaoran wept for him more than his mistress, and even me.

I grieved, truly, but my sentiments were unmatched against a human's heart, brimming with pain and grief. When the lifeline is short, experiences were that much more significantly felt. Cerberus and I were brothers, borne of old magic, keepers of a galactic balance existing for centuries before the Kinomoto's and Li's. Was I callous for not weeping?

"_No," _my brother's voice whispered in the dream haze. _"We'll meet again soon enough, and then you'll weep. And I'll laugh."_

"_I miss you," _I replied.

A few years later, Syaoran joined my brother in the afterlife. Mistress and I grieved concisely, a few days remembering.

Days were nothing, years close, decades quick.

Time changed-.

Time changed us all.

Now, in the not-so-distant present, all we had were each other.

Unexpectedly drowsed, my eyelids closed. I felt her hand move over my forehead, sliding to my cheek, and finally her warm lips pressing against mine. Honeyed aftertaste. When she broke away, I spoke again, "This is only a dream, is it not?"

"Does it matter?" she asked.

My eyes stayed shut, fearful of leaving this place too soon. Small wings gently grazed my cheek, where her hand previously touched.

"Perhaps it's best for me to not know whether this is a prophecy or merely what I wish for nightly."

Her laughter filled my head, infusing into all my neurons. Action potentials fired, miniature fireworks inside, shifting, changing, building…memories? She was in all of my mind, seeping into lobes, searching… searching...

"This is what I dream," she said. "Of you."

"Mistress…" I began. Throat clenched, breathing faltering.

Stroked medulla oblongata.

No, limbic system.

A small voice buzzed inside, "Of you dreaming of me."

Fluttering sounds.

Angular caplet flowed over me. Long streams of hair, rivaling mine.

An echo drowning in thoughts, "...you dreaming of me..."

Image: A midnight kiss on the Tokyo Tower.

Sound (hers): "I love you."

Emotion: Nostalgia.

Image: Blind prophet.

Sound (mine): "_Sakura_."

Disenchantment. Realization, déjà vu.

Soft weeping. I want to comfort her, even as she betrays me. I touch my face to discover tears forming thin lines.

My eyes slowly opened…


End file.
